TechRepublic's Teena Maddox talks to Colin Morris, Director of Product Management with Adobe Analytics Mobile about a plan to gather data from cars to analyze.

Colin Morris: Adobe recently released a user-consumer survey on understanding the use of voice assistant analytics overall, and how trends are working with everyday consumers, and where growth is coming from, and their use of home-smart speakers and voice assistance in general. And I think the key takeaway for us is that it's not a fad anymore. I mean, voice assistants are now branching beyond just smart speakers and silo-ed experiences, and consumers are using them more deeply, for better experiences, than what they already have been doing, such as just checking their stocks or checking quick sports scores and really having a branded, personalized experience go with the consumer as they go on their customer journey with whatever brand they're working with.

So what we see now is that there's going to be, according to the survey and according to consumers, deeper interactions with things like gaming, personalized shopping, and being able to a query health issues, to be able to understand better data on content overall, and consume things in a more immersive manner with more personalized content including from other channels, which is an important point, because as we see brands bring in data from other channels and serve that into a contextually relevant voice experience, you're going to start to see better brand loyalty overall, higher retention, and longer sessions, which we're already starting to see in voice. Even though the average session length in voice is shorter right now than within mobile apps, per se, there is a more immersive experience, and importantly with the data, bringing in data from other channels for that particular consumer is going to provide a better experience.

So really with voice, it's all about how brands use the data and how they can kind of expand their footprint beyond their traditional channels to be able to leverage voice and have a better consumer experience, whether that's shopping, whether that's interacting with a sport, whether that's any interaction that works for that particular vertical. What we've seen is that smart speaker adoption is accelerating, definitely on the rise now, and the use of voice assistants within those smart speakers and beyond is something that is being more immersive and having a longer engagement time overall, which is better for brands. And the growth we've seen over the last year doesn't even incorporate Q4 growth, which is kind of where most smart speakers are sold in general. So we expect, by next year, to have a huge adoption of new devices in homes that can be leveraged via voice assistants, whether within a particular experience in a smart speaker, or beyond — and other connected home devices. So it's an exciting time, we think, for those interactions.

One of the reasons that Adobe Analytics is entering the connected car space in terms of insights and bridging those insights with mobile app insights and web insights and voice assistant insights is that a lot of the EOMs and car manufacturers now realize that, for them to stay afloat in a very volatile market, they need to extend their brand beyond the car, and they need to provide services, specifically digital services, that persist and have a better brand experience with the consumer with more value in other places. So the reason that we've been starting to collect in-car analytics and merge that with mobile app analytics is because there's lots more personalized experiences that brands can give based on their usage and what they need, based on their tastes, whether it's music types, whether it's how they drive their car or services that they need for maintenance, whether it's promoting things based on their location or tastes and preference in what they like to consume in terms of coffee types or food, and really kind of understanding how the data in the car, which is really the next mobile device, influences other channels.

So for instance, if someone might be looking for a new particular car, and the OEM understands that that user's lease is going to be up soon, but they haven't treated the car very well. They can use telematics data to inform whether they're going to provide the same lease terms or not. Or likewise, if a car company wants to do a revenue share based on location as they're doing now with a lot of e-commerce plays within the car, they can have a promotion of a particular gas type, or they could have a promotion of a particular food type based on the habits of the user. And it all or works to be a better user experience overall because they're blending experiences from different channels, and it helps the OEMs get into new businesses that they haven't been able to touch before, whether it's media or retail finance, a whole bunch of different areas there.

So we find it's going to be a very rich area with great data that they can merge and start to understand that real customer journey, beyond where they're going within the car, but also what a car ends up being with voice assistants. It's super interesting to see how people interact with their car, and their navigation, rather than touching a screen, per se ... and, what that means for brands, especially OEMs, to extend their brand beyond just what the in-car experience is.

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About Teena Maddox

Teena Maddox is a Senior Writer at TechRepublic, covering hardware devices, IoT, smart cities and wearables. She ties together the style and substance of tech. Teena has spent 20-plus years writing business and features for publications including Peo...

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Teena Maddox is a Senior Writer at TechRepublic, covering hardware devices, IoT, smart cities and wearables. She ties together the style and substance of tech. Teena has spent 20-plus years writing business and features for publications including People, W and Women's Wear Daily.